And crows are fatted with the murrion flock

As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents:
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock . . .

Midsummer Night's Dream. Act One. Scene One.

I noticed something funny with the weather late last spring when the tumbleweeds grew froward. One knocked on my back door, asking for a handout. When I told it to chop me a cord of wood for the stove and I would give it a cup of broth and a stale cheese rind it made a ferocious sound, something between a Bronx cheer and a fog horn, and then rolled away.

Instead of coming back from the South, the migrated birds had a troop of frowzy sparrows hang For Rent signs on their old but sturdy nests. There were no takers, and large yellow wasps moved in, squatting in angry squalor. It took a SWAT team ten hours to smoke them out and escort them down to Guantanamo. 

That's when all the clouds in the sky started looking like Pennywise the Clown. And it rained every time someone mentioned the name "Morey Amsterdam." In fact, it ONLY rained when Morey Amsterdam's name was mentioned, and so there were long periods of drought followed by tremendous flash floods whenever the Dick Van Dyke Show had a run on Netflix. 

The glaciers in Greenland went on strike; they simply refused to stay frozen and flowed away into sinkholes, leaving behind walrus tusks and flint arrowheads that were stamped "Hecho en Mexico."

The final indignity came when a typhoon formed over Nebraska and wouldn't budge for six months. They named it Hector and were at a loss to explain why it whipped corn stalks into the air which then landed miles away transformed into parking meters -- they were quite heavy and injured a number of corn chandlers who were too dumb to get out of the rain. By the time the storm finally cleared everyone had forgotten where it happened (this was Nebraska, remember) and Disney made a movie about it that took place in Nova Scotia.

And that's when I realized that global warming was no joke, just as Shakespeare had centuries ago. 

(This piece of nonsense is dedicated to John Schwartz, of the New York Times.)